Sunday, September 23, 2007

Great Faith Race: Round 6

CafePress.com is a wonderfully diverse marketplace. Which led me to wonder how diverse it really is. Therefore, I decided to run an experiment called "The Great Faith Race." I took a sampling of major religions or religious figures and searched in the CafePress marketplace to see how many designs came up. Then I just sorted the results and am sharing them below. I ran this list the first time on April 30, 2007 and the second time on May 15, 2007 and the third time on June 10, 2007 and a forth time on July 8, 2007 and a fifth time on August 11, 2007 then again today, so I'll also include comparison data.

CLICK ON THE TABLE FOR BETTER READABILITY

COMPARISON DATA: The comparison data is for data on 9/23/07 compared to 8/11/07.

NEWLY ADDED: Twelve new items added this round. Special thanks goes out to John's Secret Identity for his contributions: Rastafari, Unitarianism, Sikh, Amish, Sikhism, Shinto, Neopaganism, Bahai, Jainism, Mennonite and Zoroastrianism. I added Confucianism all on my own.

NEWLY DELETED: None this round. We have 43 religious terms on the list presently. Perhaps in future rounds we will try to keep it at 50 and under. 50 sounds like a good amount to track, especially considering we don't get paid to do this. Not yet anyway. *evil laugh* Of course, we don't know anyone who would ever pay us for this.

OBSERVATIONS: The Flying Spaghetti Monster had the highest percentage gain for this round at an 18.9% increase in the number of designs, followed by Muhammad, Dagon and Hindu. No others had a double-digit increase in terms of percentage gains. Christian, God, Jesus and Pagan had the largest number of additional designs uploaded since Round Five, furthering their respective leads for dominance. Atheist, Wiccan and Jewish put up some respectible numbers as well. Scientology was the only one to lose ground this round with a 1.3% decline.

DISCLAIMERS: Although this appears to be very scientific in nature, this assumption should not be made. In other words, this is an unscientific study. Use this information, if at all, at your own risk. We make absolutely no warranties, expressed or implied, as to ... well ... anything. You get the drift.

Feel free to add your comments or observations. If I ever feel compelled to run "The Great Faith Race" again, did I miss any of your favorite religions or religious icons? Let us know!